Exam questions on labelling and media amplification of deviance.
1. Examine the relationship between deviance and labelling. (with relation to sociological theory) (12 marks)
Labelling theory is an aspect of the interactionist approach to crime and deviance. Interactionists reject structural causal explanations of crime and deviance put forward by functionalists and realists. They look instead at the way crime and deviance is socially constructed.
According to labelling theory criminal and deviant behaviour is socially constructed. Every society makes rules governing deviant behaviour and applies them in different ways. Prostitution is an example of this. If some behaviour can be deviant in one context but non-deviant in another it is not the quality of the act the person commits but the consequence of the application of rules and sanctions on to an ‘offender’. Criminals are different to non-criminals only when they are publically labelled as such by a control agency. Deviant behaviour is therefore behaviour that has been labelled.
Becker argues that social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders. The extent of deviance is also socially constructed. Becker claims that the amount and distribution of c/d in society is dependent on the processes of social interaction between the deviant and powerful agencies of social control. Whether a person is deviant depends on who has committed and who has observed the act, when and where the act was committed and the negotiations that take place between the different ‘social actors’. Powerless groups are more likely to be labelled than powerful. For example blacks are 5 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than whites and more likely to be labelled schizophrenics by psychiatrists than whites.
Becker also argues that deviance can be amplified by the act of labelling. He argues that the labelled gain a master status e.g. paedophile, drug addict, which is so powerful that everything about that person is interpreted in the light of that label.
Once a person has been labelled deviant they are then segregated by that label (lose their job, friends, family), become an outsider associate with others who have been cast out which creates the effect that more people think of them as deviants. People react in a stronger way towards them and the ‘deviant’ continues to engage in behaviour that society expects from them. A self fulfilling prophecy is set into motion and the deviant may join a deviant sub-culture where their behaviour can be justified and supported.
Lemert supports Becker’s ideas on the consequence of labelling. He maintains that primary deviance which has not been labelled has few consequences for the individual. However, once deviance is labelled it becomes secondary and impacts on the individual through the process of gaining a master status and developing a self fulfilling prophecy.
Labelling is accepted by phenomenologists who focus on the individual motivations behind deviance and ethnomethodologists who view that deviance is based on subjective decision making and is hence a social construction.
However, the interactionist approach ignores the wider structural and cultural causes of crime and deviance, for example anomie and marginalisation.